Africa Art This Instant

Africa Art This Instant

Contemporary African art has had a niche among American collectors for several decades, but young artists in Africa are abandoning traditional media completely, and wholeheartedly embracing strictly digital art.

I have several precious oil canvasses bought decades ago in Africa which have been fortunate enough to appreciate in value commensurate with the unique quality. But it’s time to move on. The best young artists in Africa are no longer taking out a canvas and mixing colors with a brush. They’re doing it digitally.

Certainly digital art includes filmmaking, which we tend here at home to separate out as an entire media in itself. But it is by no means the end-all and be-all of African digital art, which includes all varieties of media translated through digital media.

Kennyan Wangechi Mutu is renowned for her dramatic female figures. Mutu’s work has been featured in some of the finest museums and galleries in the world including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Tate Modern in London, and the Centre Pompidou in Paris.

Egyptian Miriam Ibrahim (one of her most famous pieces is shown at the bottom of this blog) describes her passion for digitally altering her portrait photography as one of a “deviantart.” Her often haunting portraits suggest women beset by overwhelming fears, oppressed and lost.

Saidi Ray begins and often ends with traditional acrylics but he sells the finished work not as pieces of canvas but as digital art. From Tanzania, he takes what only a few years ago would have been considered quite traditional primary color renditions of traditional subjects, like native tribes, and whisks them into modern media, a contemporary surrealism.

But of them all Kenyan Mutua Matheka epitomizes the ultimate in digital art: instagram. (His signature piece titles this blog.) His remarkably creative and powerful images are as expansive or focused as the movements of your fingers spreading on the iPad. Above all, Mutua represents what African art has become today.

For many more examples from artists across the continent, click here.

Techtonic in Nature

Techtonic in Nature

Separate but Equal: A chilling phrase used throughout history to justify such barbaric ideas as apartheid and reenforce the power of the status quo has now been applied to African wilderness in an attempt to save lions. It’s more naive than offensive.

Sorry to be such a drag on your week, but when the world’s greatest carnivore scientists conclude that the only way to maintain healthy populations of wild lions is to fence them, somebody’s got to remind them that then they’re no longer wild.

One of the greatest field researchers ever, Dr. Craig Packer of the University of Minnesota, led a team of 46 researchers that published this succinct and piercing recommendation earlier this month.

Lion populations have been declining for some time, and the study confirmed many earlier studies and reports that the decline is directly linked to lion/human population conflicts.

(There are, by the way, too many big cats in zoos.)

The March publication in Ecology Letters Online will become the definitive treatise on lion declines. Its cram-packed data is perfectly if masterfully compiled leading to a vastly understated conclusion that is tectonic in nature:

Fences.

The study acknowledges “fencing has so far only been widely employed in a few African countries because of aesthetic objections, financial costs and the impracticality of enclosing large-scale migratory ungulate populations.”

Presuming the local African has serious “aesthetic objections” to fencing strikes me if not racist patently patronizing, so let’s move on:

Packer et al conclude that it would cost $2000 per square km to preserve lion at about half their potential densities in the wild unfenced, as compared to about $500 per square km to sustain populations at 80% of their “wild” potential fenced.

This means it would cost about $30 million to fence Tanzania’s largest reserve, The Selous, and then an additional $22 million annually to manage that fencing.

In a cash strapped and aid-dependent economy, these numbers are mind boggling. I don’t doubt their veracity but when compared with the needs of human villages in the same areas in which lions now thrive, there is no chance this will be embraced locally.

That defaults the solution to foreign donors.

How do lions rank in the following list of priorities?

Water, Food, Electricity, Sanitation, Health, Education not to mention anti-poverty.

Finally, it isn’t just wildebeest or elephant migrations that are essential to the wild as we know it. It’s less dramatic and more subtle elephant and buffalo migrations, which need massive corridors to maintain healthy populations.

You might, indeed, fence lions and wildebeest and zebra. In fact Botswana did so, and it crashed their wilderness in the mid 1980s, leaving today a nice place to visit but hardly the wild that existed back then, with possibly a third of the animal populations deciminated.

But you can’t fence elephants, and buffalo are problematic. So are we talking about a “wild ecosystem” for lions that excludes anything over, say, two tons? Is this not as dramatic an alteration in what the “wild is” as one without lion?

An equally powerful if nuanced conclusion from this study is that social policies by governments like Tanzania and Mozambique which have struggled to allow indigenous populations to coexist with the wild, is a bad idea … (at least for the animals):

“Negative conservation impacts of human land use can often be [read: “should be”] minimized by restricting conflicting activities to separate areas rather than by encouraging their co-existence.”

A third of the Serengeti/Mara/Ngorongoro ecosystem is the Ngorongoro Conservation Area, which allows traditional Maasai to continue living and using the land. Similar policies exist in Mozambique and Uganda on wide tracts of wilderness.

These are not recent policies generated in any way as a response to human/wildlife conflicts. Rather, they were policies forced by the reality that humans with a right to ownership of the “wilderness” have been living there for eons.

Adopting Packer et al’s policy in this regards heralds back to the Trail of Tears, the justification at the time for which was much more noble than protecting a wild beast.

As Packer said with not but a bit of irritation to the New York Times:

“Let’s get real, here.” (Although in quite a different connotation.)

Packer is an outstanding scientist. But he’s a rather poor humanist, and with this study, either nihilistic or simply frustrated. By the way, he’s likely right, too.

What this means simply is that the wild is ending. Zoos are as capable of guarding a species’ survival as the wild can. Biodiversity on typical macro levels is in grave danger, and that may indeed bode ill for the world.

But the wild is ending. And ending the wild cannot be stopped if mankind doesn’t rev up into high gear, first, its own human development.

And that, Johnny, is the real story. There is no separate but equal. There is only togetherness.

The only possible solution to fixing lions’ lives is to fix people’s lives, if not first at least at the same time.

Terese & Goliath

Terese & Goliath

The widely publicized elephant poaching is mostly gross exaggeration when compared to the corporate poaching that nearly extirpated them in the 1980s but nonetheless a terrifying example of how mens’ wars exploit the natural world.

I’ve written before how the current elephant poaching is being sensationalized by the media as something much larger than it really is. Elephant populations in almost every part of Africa continue to increase, even though poaching is also increasing.

This dynamic is quite different than in the 1980s. And the reason is simply that the scale of poaching then was exponential compared to now.

The near extirpation of the species then led to the world-wide CITES treaty which was instrumental in stopping, and reversing, the poaching.

Today’s poaching is different, but no less terrifying: Until recently, anyway, it was confined to individual bands of men – not corporately organized mobile slaughter houses. It was motivated by individuals’ survival, not market driven or as an OPEC hedge.

One or two tusks were hauled to local markets, not tons lifted by helicopters to Yemen. And the poachers are generally individuals who pocket the loot and disappear, not by organizations that return again and again to better their last bottom line.

But the increase in poaching – however slight compared to the 1980s – has been enough to stimulate the black market. And small-band, individual crime that characterizes the majority of elephant poaching today is transforming into something much worse in certain areas.

I only hope the telling of this story will not fuel the hype. Jeffrey Gettleman of the New York Times first reported the situation last September. Unfortunately the wider media took the sensitive report and exaggerated it, presuming what was happening in the jungles of The Congo was the same that was happening in Tanzania’s national parks.

It is the lazy inability by buzz-word, snapshot media to separate the two phenomenon that so disturbs me. And I continue to presume that the former situation described so well by Gettleman does not represent a significantly new threat to the species. And certainly the one-off poaching by ad hoc bans of survivalists doesn’t, either.

Nevertheless, a report we received this weekend from the famous primate researcher, Terese Hart from the depths of The Congo, suggests what Gettleman reported in September is increasing and spreading.

Hart describes with the courage of an MGM lion and in near legalistic detail how a convicted war criminal escaped poor detention and has organized a serious elephant poaching band in the depths of The Congo’s jungle where she works.

Everyone should read her blow-by-blow account: Click here.

The story illustrates the unsung courage of many local Africans wholly dedicated to conservation, of the potential effectiveness of The Congo government’s military (a story in itself), and how the wanton neglect of the developed world dumped weaponry into the hands of thugs.

Hart is a renowned researcher. She’s become now nothing less than a crusader, and many of us worry for her safety.

The sad fact of Hart’s story is that nothing is going to change unless major powers like the United States take ownership of their wanton neglect and aggressively begin cleaning up the loose weaponry of the world.

Simultaneously with powers like China aggressively stopping the trade in illegal ivory.

And until that action formula reaches The Congo, elephant may not be in as much danger as Terese Hart.

All Hail The Chief

All Hail The Chief

Kenya’s future is in the hands of a man little known outside Kenya: Willy Mutunga. The 65-year old Chief Justice will render his High Court’s decision on the recent election Saturday morning.

The country’s tension is building, its currency is falling, and protests are being prepared not just to follow the court’s decision, but right now to protest strict measures the government has imposed to ban public demonstrations.

But despite all this tension, Willy Mutunga can legitimately claim to have the trust of most Kenyans.

The Chief Justice has a long history of democratic activism, including a long stint in jail under the former dictator, Daniel arap Moi. His choice by Parliament was one of the easiest and least contentious of all appointments mandated by the new constitution.

His demeanor throughout the proceedings contesting the March 4 election has been exemplary. He’s been transparent, ordering live broadcasts of the deliberations.

And he’s given himself and the other five justices of the high court five days of full deliberations to make a decision.

Many would argue that is hardly enough to wade through the hundreds of petitions, reaves of evidence and uncountable allegations flinging between the two camps of president-elect Uhuru Kenyatta and aggrieved challenger, Raila Odinga.

And while that may be true, Mutunga knows all too well that this episode in Kenya must be brought to a conclusion.

Every day that passes without a court decision affirming Kenyatta’s election, confusion and complexity builds. Who is running the government? It’s not clearly known, as the former president Kibaki is dead silent.

Office holders under the last regime, which supposedly has ended, are becoming more and more vocal and partisan. Today, the attorney general petitioned Mutunga to consider that the “government” believes Kenyatta is the president.

If too much time passes whatever is left of the Kenyan government will be replaced by anarchy. Mutunga knows this, so he specifically advised the nation when the decision will be made: Saturday morning.

“I have given most of my life to a better Kenya and if taking it is what will be required to consolidate and secure our democratic gains … that is a price I am not afraid to pay,” Mutunga said recently, revealing the many death threats he’s received.

It may be this widely disseminated statement that has elicited the public trust. Death rates are rampant. Social media is beyond the pale. It is hard to underestimate the vitriol and anger in Kenya, today.

And frankly, I don’t think Mutunga and his court will render a decision on the evidence. The evidence is too voluminous, too contentious, too imperfect. It would take months to determine the ballots that were mismarked or miscounted. This will have be a ruling from the hip.

The ruling will be on whether the election authority which pronounced Kenyatta the victor with less than 10,000 votes of 12.2 million cast should be honored, or whether it should be denied and a new election process started.

The easiest thing to do is simply affirm the outcome. After all, all the parties in the election had expressed unqualified support for the election body which made the call. The Constitution gives this body wide latitudes of decision-making.

But not affirming the outcome seems more rational. Ballot counting was an unqualified mess; all sides agree on this. The .07% margin of victory is therefore a ridiculous conclusion.

But not affirming the outcome requires the court to suggest a remedy, a new election or run-off, all within its power but which then essentially emasculates all the months and years of institutional preparation Kenyans had invested in the election.

I predict the court will rule the election invalid. But I’ve been sorely wrong predicting events associated with this election, and no matter what the court does, Kenya’s greatest challenges are yet to come.

Walkabout

Walkabout

The Botswana bushmen have finally been excluded from their homeland, having lost the final skirmishes in more than a century of battling to retain their right to a traditional life in the Central Kalahari Reserve.

As of today, Botswana’s ancestral San people may only enter the reserve on month-long permits, one third the stay allowed foreigners entering the reserve for tourism. The news was reported today by a respected African publication in London.

The Botswana government claims the exclusion policy is for environmental protection and Bushman community development, but tourism has become increasingly popular in the area, and … diamonds have been found, there.

The forced removal of peoples from their ancestral homelands is hardly new. The removal of Maasai from ancestral homelands in the Moru Kopjes in 1972 led to an immediate expansion of the Serengeti National Park that substantially and almost immediately increased animal populations, making the area more attractive for tourism.

Perhaps the most egregious of forced native removals were native Americans in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, horribly summarized in what is commonly known as the Trail of Tears.

The difference with today’s situation with Bushmen in Botswana, and the next most recent similar situation with Maasai in Tanzania, is that the Bushmen seemed to have prevailed with a 2011 High Court decision that aggregated a number of earlier decisions securing use of their homelands.

But the Botswana government simply ignored its own high court orders and has continuously refused aboriginal people entry into the reserved and harassed those who snuck in.

The government’s defiant policy has succeeded in part because the numbers of Bushmen in the area seeking traditional rights in the Kalahari has plummeted in the last decade. There were likely 5,000 Bushmen in the Kalahari 50 years ago; today there are probably fewer than 1,000.

Numbers are down because — as the government is eager to show — many Bushmen have taken advantage of government education and training programs that result in their abandoning the traditional life style.

In the last few years I’ve encountered San people working in the Kalahari in tourist camps and have admired their wit as well as their intellect. Clearly at least for those few individuals, they had no desire to return to the bush.

Last June South Africa gave a state funeral to a famous Bushman who had worked his entire life for the betterment of his people. But as with himself and his children, that was principally to educate them in modern schools and find them modern, urban jobs.

Contemporary, modern opportunities for Botswana people are considerably better than for most other Africans from other countries on the continent. Botswana’s economic situation while challenged during the global recession is far superior to most of the rest of Africa, because of its rich endowment of diamonds and other minerals.

So the question devolves simply into whether the government – the wider community – knows better what’s good for certain individuals than they themselves claim. And whether the trade-off, ancestral land for a good-paying job and healthy lifestyle, is worth it.

The age-old argument applies to peoples round the world, from such diverse theories of eminent domain to gun control. Exclusion from ancestral lands is certainly at the extreme end of this spectrum, but fundamentally is no different from any individual liberty restriction.

How far can a government go restricting individual liberties and still be moral?

The removals of the Shoshone, Yavapai and Navajo in the United States were certainly no less egregious than the Bushman from the Kalahari.

Is it just that we pine for the old days? Or are we afraid of our own power, even if it will better a peoples? Or as with native Americans, that we really don’t care what happens to them?

On Safari: East versus South

On Safari: East versus South

Six weeks in sub-Saharan Africa has confirmed my long-held views on where the best game viewing is and why, how seriously threatened the wilderness is by remarkably fast and unregulated economic growth, and how youthful optimism about Africa’s future mostly discounts its precious wilderness.

Wild rhino in the Okavango Delta.
My first stint of the year began in Cape Town, included Johannesburg, multiple places in Botswana including the Okavango Delta, Victoria Falls and Zambia, Nairobi, and ended as I guided my first “great migration safari” in northern Tanzania.

The ability to contrast East and southern Africa so immediately corroborates my long-held view that East Africa provides better game viewing for the typical safari traveler.

This might seem strange when I also tell you that in a single day on Chief’s Island in Botswana we saw the Big Five (lion, leopard, rhino, elephant and buffalo) and that seeing the Big Five in East Africa is no longer guaranteed no matter how many days you have on safari.

That’s because rhino is so rare, today, in East Africa. (Caution: captive or contained rhino, as found in fenced places like Nakuru National Park, Solio and elsewhere in

We saw this bushbuck unnaturally traveling with a baboon family in Lake Manyara. Its possible adoption by the baboons is an example of East Africa's stressed wilderness.
Laikipia including Lewa Downs, doesn’t count. Those are fun to visit, but they aren’t true wildernesses, anymore.)

But therein lies the important distinction between East and southern African game viewing. The south’s wilderness has been managed much better over the last century. Kruger National Park in South Africa is likely the best managed wilderness on earth.

Groups of up to 20 giraffe in East Africa are common. Much smaller numbers in southern Africa.
For more than a century, Kruger and similar southern African wilderenesses have sustained rich and varied biomasses. Although currently suspended throughout much of southern Africa including Kruger, culling had been and in many places still is an instrument of aggressive pruning that aimed to insure the most diverse biomass possible.

Culling has never occurred in East Africa, and likely because of its cost rather than any moral inhibition. Similarly, the south routinely reintroduces or just moves around various species from one wilderness to another in an attempt to achieve balance.

Anti-poaching is far better funded and managed in the south. All decisions about park management, its borders and its sustenance (including the still controversial actions of creating unnatural watering holes from aquifers) has come from officials that are far better trained and paid in the south than in the East.

So in a relatively short time in Botswana visiting two different areas in the Okavango Delta and Moremi we saw a balanced variety of several dozen types of larger mammals including a dozen elephant families and large numbers of buffalo and several prides of lion.

In Botswana’s Chobe balance has gone to the wind. Chobe is almost all elephants: too many, and at the exclusion of much of the rest of its historical biomass. It’s heart-breaking for me to return to areas along the Chobe River that were oncebeautiful forests and are, today, grasslands. The elephant population has destroyed much of Chobe’s former wilderness. It is, in fact, more like East Africa than southern Africa.

Which is why so many people love Chobe. There are so many elephants in so many endearing behaviors and from time to time dangerously so, that Chobe like so much of East Africa provides the thrills often missing from a more balanced and rich biomass.

We see about the same number of leopard in east and southern Africa.
One implication in the above is that East Africa (and Chobe) are worse wildernesses, because the biomass is less rich, because they have either been poorly or not managed.

This remains to be seen. I think the scientific consensus points in this direction, but it’s been pointing in that direction for an awfully long time and we have yet to experience “the crash” scientists have been predicting for such out-of-balance wilderness.

Scientists might pale at the biocount of these wildernesses, but tourists are thrilled: On my great migration safari of 11 days in northern Tanzania, we saw 61 lions, 2 leopards, 5 rhino, and I don’t know maybe 500 elephant and a quarter million wildebeest? And perhaps several hundred thousand zebra, a hundred giraffe, and – very important by the way – fewer tourists than in Botswana.

This last observation, that my safari clients in East Africa encountered fewer other tourists did my safari clients in Botswana, is not the norm. Most East African tourists on the lodge circuit will definitely encounter more tourists than a similarly budgeted trip in southern Africa.

Who's looking at whom?
But I don’t like the lodge circuit, and the safaris I guide are expensive. This lets me remove my game viewing from heavily used tourist areas into the East African wildernesses that are truly less used than virtually any wilderness in the south.

The unmanaged, some say chaotic, out-of-balance wildernesses of Chobe and much of East Africa result in greater numbers of larger animals at the expensive of many smaller ones that have gone extinct.

Theoretically, this situation is not sustainable. And this tension of nature trying to preserve itself is likely the reason for the much greater drama usually experienced on an East African safari.

It’s certainly a bitter sweet reminder that urgent action to preserve these great East African wildernesses has been grossly neglected. But as crass as it may seem, it also provides at least for the moment (and perhaps at the cost of the future), the “greatest wildlife spectacles on earth.”

Storm Clouds over Kenya

Storm Clouds over Kenya

Storm clouds are forming over Kenya. The thunder and lightning and destruction has not yet started, and all of us who love Kenya hope it will not, but the anger is palpable and as a safari broker I must advise all considering Kenya for the moment to stay clear.

My blog yesterday about the election went viral and the hate, death threats, invective and dirty speech publically thrown back at me as comments on the blog and Facebook are chilling.

For the first time ever I changed something that I had written – or rather, photoshopped. I worried that the photoshopped picture was being misconstrued, that I was suggesting that the current election had experienced violence.

It didn’t. There was an incident in Mombasa on election morning that left six dead, but that was it. The rest of the day, and up to this very moment as I write, has been peaceful, and as I wrote on the day after the election, joyously so.

So I have changed yesterday’s blog picture to eliminate the possible connotation otherwise. In Facebook I post twice: once for the full picture and once for the link to the blog. Facebook entries cannot be edited, only removed, so I simply removed the full-size picture. But the other has to remain, so if you wish to see what the picture was that worried me, go to AfricaAnswerman on Facebook.

I do not want to contribute to the growing anger. But as Mwirigi posting the first comment to the respected columnist Macharia Gaitho in today’s Daily Nation says, “I am against any attempt to muzzle free speech. This is how it starts, we have come from a time where it was a crime to imagine the death of the president. Many people have fought long and hard for us to have the ability to express ourselves freely.”

I read Gaitho religiously. He’s an outstanding columnist. Today he says, “The level of malevolent hate, ethnic bigotry, incendiary words and totally criminal incitement [on social media] would put to shame the infamous hate media outlets of the Rwanda Genocide, the newspaper, Kangura, and Radio Télévision Libre Mille-Collines.”

So I am hardly alone. In fact, my few thousands of hits and comments are minuscule compared to the extraordinary traffic on Kenyan sites.

The second comment on Gaitho’s column by Njamba says, “We should differentiate between freedom of speech and abusive and hate speech.” But she continues to incorrectly conclude this means we as individuals can’t come to conclusions or predictions about the future.

And therein Njamba and thousands other Kenyans hit the slippery slope, giving only lip service to free speech by inhibiting it from reasoning to points of view. Unless, of course, it’s their point of view.

“Right now I feel let down,” Gaitho continues today, “and very ashamed to be a Kenyan, for the level of post-election violence assaulting my eyes and ears every day is worse now than it was before and during the elections.”

Words cut ideas. Machetes cut throats. How close are we today to the latter?

My opinion: too close to plan a trip there. As a safari broker professional, I cannot let anyone go to Kenya, now. If the Kenyan Supreme Court invalidates Kenyatta/Ruto winning the election, as I think it will, and calls for a run-off election, all hell could break lose.

Gaitho: “Any time there is bloodshed in Kenya, you will never see Raila Odinga, Uhuru Kenyatta and William Ruto or their families in the line of fire… They will be swilling champagne and cutting business deals in … members’ clubs.

“Their children and grandchildren will not be wielding weapons in the battlegrounds, but will be safely squirreled away in some posh boarding schools in England, Switzerland or South Africa; or if of age, gambling and drinking away a fraction of daddy’s fortune.

“A cursory look at the social media war will indicate that the “principals” are not typing out a single word in anger. They leave that to their rabid followers and hired guns who… will throw all caution to the wind and put their bodies on the line.”

I so hope this doesn’t happen. But how can I feel otherwise, now, than it might?

Africans have an art of patience that far exceeds ours. As travelers and brokers of travel, we now have to be patient. We have to wait before returning to Kenya. We have to wait for a certain peace.

Kenyan Nightmare Continues

Kenyan Nightmare Continues

Kenya is peaceful but disturbed. A famous national analyst Saturday said the country is “on the brink of implosion.” The loser in the presidential election is challenging the results in court, but if he loses the president and vice-president of Kenya will be international criminals indicted for crimes against humanity. This is not acceptable.

“An uncomfortable silence pervades the public sphere,” Godwin Murunga wrote this weekend in Kenya’s largest newspaper, the Daily Nation. “We are afraid of our feelings.”

So the country waits on pins and needles and does so by being quiet. A once robust media discusses fashion and school tests while the Joker and his prime assistant prepare a government of iniquity. A fabulous new constitution sits like an butterfly in a cocoon waiting for a dictator to roast it before it hatches.

And the world holds its breath, so happy there’s not another war or revolution, hoping perhaps beyond hope that the New Kenya will right itself.

But how?

The mistake came long ago when in the many wonderful and difficult things the country was doing to recreate itself, it allowed indicted international criminals to become candidates. What else could it do? Does not democracy revere the right of the accused to be considered innocent until proven guilty?

And, in fact, multiple accused by the World Court in The Hague have been ultimately released or original charges dropped before trial.

But I think the more important fact is that the World Court’s standards for irrefutable evidence is so great – so much more substantial than country courts around the world including the U.S. – that just to be indicted is at the very least reason to prohibit the indicted from assuming national office or responsibility.

Even as a contradiction to democracy and the purity of law that governs it. The interlude between indictment and conviction was the loophole that put Kenya in the mess it finds itself, today.

And that’s the point. So even while people like myself are convinced that Uhuru Kenyatta and William Ruto will be convicted by The World Court, their simple indictment should have prevented Kenya from allowing them to become candidates.

Uhuru Kenyatta and William Ruto, the current president-elect and vice-president-elect, are not nice guys. They are greedy, conniving politicians whose families have looted the poor Kenyan for generations.

Their success was brilliantly created. Singly they couldn’t survive, because they come from tribes that are historical arch enemies. Together they combined their enmity to defeat all that was good in Kenya.

Raila Odinga, the challenger who lost, is not purity incarnate, but he is considerably less corrupt, untainted by scandals, and was not the least bit implicated in engineering the violence of 2007 as the ICC has charged Kenyatta and his running mate, William Ruto, were.

Odinga’s challenge of the outcome of the election in the Kenyan courts is substantial. Kenyatta was declared the winner by less than 8,000 votes of more than 12 million cast. The election was bungled. One of Kenya’s finest analysts called the election “shambolic.”

The list of counting grievances includes districts whose vote tally exceeded the number of people registered there. It includes up to a half million votes that were declared spoiled by incorrect marking, even while the intention of the voter was clear.

It includes thousands of discrepancies between parallel methods of counting that were intended to confirm one another.

It is, in a nutshell, a mess. And it is that mess that even if too complicated to untangle stands as a powerful reason to claim that .07% of the votes cast might not be legitimate.

Yet at the same time peace has been sustained and security prevails, today. “Many Kenyans… have spent the last 5 years trying to avoid a repetition” of the violence of 2007, writes Magnus Taylor, a South African who reported daily from Nairobi on the election. But he adds:

“Kenya is far from being over the nightmare.”

On Safari: Great Migration

On Safari: Great Migration

This year’s Great Migration is an almost constant sea of animals from the eastern Serengeti plains to the western and beyond, one of the most placid and easiest to see that I can remember.

Seeing the migration is like seeing the stars. You can never see them all, and you can’t even see at once all those that might be in your field of vision. The sky is just too large, and so is the Serengeti. Two million animals might not seem like a lot when you’re atop Naabi Hill, but it is.

I figure that at the very best views of the Serengeti, one of which is atop Naabi Hill, when pointed in any one given direction the most you can see is about 25 square miles, and if the animals in the migration were packed into every crevice of that view, you’d maybe see 150,000 animals, a tenth of the great migration.

The migration for us this year is not sardine packaging.The veld is green and beautiful across almost the entire southern Serengeti, and so the grass is abundant everywhere. The animals are dispersed much more than they would be during drier years.

We started seeing wilde right after leaving Shifting Sands outside Olduvai. We saw them continuously, although sparsely, over the plains between Shifting Sands and Lemuta Kopjes.

We had lunch atop one of the unique kopjes opposite Lemuta where the view was incredible. To the south was the giant Ngorongoro on our day covered by a super storm. But while we could see the lightning, the rest of the sky – probably 80% of our sky view – was clear and beautiful.

At lunch the density of the wilde increased. As we moved west towards Ndutu it fluctuated but we were never out of sight of large groups of wilde, and as we approached the main road the density was quite high.

We also saw many other animals, of course, including many hyaena, jackal and as a great bonus, nearly 200 eland. That’s especially beautiful as the world’s largest antelope (1600 pounds) when in a truly wild situation is especially skittish.

This massive and beautiful antelope runs at breakneck speeds and leaps nearly 8′ into the air, and unbelievable sight.

And of course we saw several kills, or possibly deaths caused during bad childbirth, covered with birds and hyaenas. This is the season for birthing, and one day we spent nearly an hour just watching a nearby female herd of wilde give birth.

That’s why this is my favorite time for the migration. It isn’t as dramatic as the racing across rivers chock full of crocodile that starts in June and continues through September (at different parts in the Serengeti and Mara), but those events are very irregular and hard to intersect.

Whereas the birthing time is when the entire herd comes to feed on the new nutrient grasses brought by the heavy rains. So everybody is together, more or less, even if more widely spaced and much calmer.

And unlike the “racing time” where the herd is fractured into innumerable smaller groups, now it is more or less uniformly on the southern grassland plains. And seeing the newborn gives an added dimension to the experience.

Nothing can ever be guaranteed in the wild. A shift in weather, an insect blight, and even an over- or under-population of animals can result in radical changes in numbers and locations. But this year everything was – more or less – normal, and we witnessed what is absolutely the greatest spectacle in the natural world.

On Safari: Crater Delight

On Safari: Crater Delight

Our full day game viewing Monday was extraordinarily productive: 5 rhinos, 34 lion (one pride finishing a kill), and lots more.

The crater was greening up following several days of heavy rain and so was particularly beautiful.

As Nancy Weinstein said, “Seeing the rain on one side and the sun on the other with all the magnificent light” produces the ethereal reality of the crater, as if you’re in some controlled smaller space where so many different things are happening so fast.

The Up Road is closed for repairs, so everyone has to leave the crater on the Sopa Road.

This makes game viewing for some of the opposite side lodges, like Serena and Crater Lodge, particularly long.

We were staying at Gibb’s Farm so were prepared for the lengthy time getting in and out.

We also went in using the Sopa Road and weren’t a few minutes out of the Lehai Forest when we saw our first pride of lion.

I was pretty sure it was the Mti Mkubwa pride (“Big Tree”) and they were incredibly fat and sassy.

We figured there were five of them, but they were pretty far in the distance and totally sacked out. Patience is the key to exceptional game viewing and we waited for a while and sure enough, they began to get up one by one and walk towards us.

With more to view as they approached, it was clear they had hunted last night. Their bellies were bulging. And I noticed not far from where our cars were on the road that there was a gully, and with all the rain we’ve had, undoubtedly plenty to drink.

And that’s exactly what happened! After lions feast on their kill, they have to drink copious amounts of water or the 15% increase in body weight resting mostly unchewed in their tummies would clog their entire GI system.

Undoubtedly they had drunk once at least, but they were now returning to drink again. And after they did, they continued towards us onto the road! So there was more to their moving than just thirst.

I figured they were either returning to the kill or perhaps returning to where there were cubs waiting.

Lionesses “den” their cubs somewhere during the hunt, and the cubs obey. Sometimes an adult female will be left behind to baby sit, but not always, and it’s always amazed me how those little critters know not to follow mom.

That was just the beginning! We then proceeded to find rhino, huge families of buffalo, of course lots of zebra and wildebeest and even hartebeest and eland. Just before lunch, we went to the hippo pool near the central lake.

Lunch was great fun in front of the Loitokitok lake, which had more hippo in it than I remember in times past. The great treat was watching a grey heron standing on the back of a slightly submerged hippo, moving through the water as if slow water skiing!

(Our picnic lunch from Gibb’s Farm was specially outstanding, but of all the goodies included I’ll never forget the brownie! Amazing.)

We saw more rhinos on our way back, and more prides of lion, and golden jackals, serval cat and a number of great birds. The large numbers of Abdim and White storks are getting ready to migrate back to Europe, so there was a lot of colorful soaring.

And it was on the way out that we once again encountered the Mti Mkubwa pride, and this time a female was dragging around the skin of a young buffalo. So it had been the kill they were returning to.

And our last glimpse of activity in the crater as we raced to get out of the park in time was one of the giant tuskers that are dying off fast.

About 30 giant tuskers went into the crater when poaching became severe in the 1970s. The crater affords a natural protection to wildlife that makes poaching very difficult. But the crater isn’t a good habitat for elephant: there aren’t enough bushes and trees; it’s almost all grass.

But the Big Tuskers learned to eat grass and have stayed ever since. But they’re now well into their 60s and dying quickly. I expect they’ll all be gone in 2 or 3 years.

** And just a little aside about our game drive Sunday in Lake Manyara National Park. See the picture below. Manyara is known for lots of baboon, true.

But we watched a young bushbuck walk with them in near lock step, stopping when they did, moving when they did and where they did. For all the world it looked like it had been adopted by the troop!

And now into the Serengeti!

On Safari: Kenyatta Wins

On Safari: Kenyatta Wins

Confusing, remarkable situation in Kenya.

As I write this Sunday night in East Africa, a man indicted for crimes against humanity is Kenya’s 4th president, and the place is quiet if solemn.

None of the foregoing may last long.

Uhuru Kenyatta was declared the 4th President of Kenya by the election authority, having won 50.07% of the vote. His nearest rival, Raila Odinga, had less than 44%. Nearly 85% of the registered voters participated.

If less than 10,000 votes are reversed, and nearly a half million are being challenged in court right now, then a run-off election will be mandated. In Kenya if less than 50% of the votes are received, the top two of the original 8 contenders must vie in a run-off election.

What that would mean is that Raila Odinga would have to command nearly all the votes that were cast for the other six candidates combined, and that seems to me unlikely. However, note that I also thought it unlikely Kenyatta would win.

The strength of Kenyatta’s polling rested heavily on his success in getting out the ethnic voters in the Rift Valley. I’m sure he would be similarly successful a second time around.

If Kenyatta remains president, or is confirmed in a run-off election, he will be the first sitting president in the world to be on trial for crimes against humanity in The Hague.

Those charges stem from the World Court’s assessment of years of fact-finding that Kenyatta was instrumental in provoking and sustaining the horrible violence that followed the 2007 elections.

The U.S. and Britain have already warned Kenya that Kenyatta as president would have “repercussion” on bilateral relationships.

It doesn’t really matter whether Kenyatta fulfills his promise to attend the trial.

The very fact he stands accused in a criminal court system which rarely arrives at the point of a trial without substantial evidence to convict is alarming.

Kenya is still peaceful.

Raila Odinga is aggressively challenging the decision in the courts, and he has substantial evidence behind him, but he is also constantly telling Kenyans to remain peaceful.

So what now?

What is a peaceful Kenya with a rogue president?

Oh, and by the way, his Vice President, William Ruto, is on trial with him, and from my point of view, is evil incarnate, by far worse than Kenyatta.

I don’t know. I don’t know whether to trust the people of Kenya so long as they remain peaceful and work within the system they so tirelessly created, or to trust the world system whose suspicions about Kenyatta and Ruto are deep and severe.

We must let more time pass. That’s the African way.

On Safari: Tarangire Cats

On Safari: Tarangire Cats

Four lion brothers together for life is not unheard of, but quite unusual and we watched them in Tarangire today after they had mastered a huge kill.

The childrens books’ rendition of lion or the incomplete TV documentaries make people believe that every lion belongs to a pride headed by a grand master who only occasionally does temporary work for MGM.

But that’s not really the case. Lion prides are composed of almost any permutation of males and females of almost any number up to and sometimes exceeding twenty. Females once together generally stay together their entire lives, unless something like a harassing male forces one away perhaps while attempting to eat the lioness’ cubs.

But take any number of lions, any combination of male and female, and you constitute a pride. And today in Tarangire we saw four brothers, fat and sassy from the night’s kill, drinking in the Silale swamp.

Their bellies were bulging, their manes grand and disheveled, and several faces bloodied by the battle of the kill. One limped. One was tailless, perhaps the result of losing a colossal fight to one of his brothers for the right to go into a pride and mate.

We had not too much earlier seen two male cheetah – all of this along the Silale swamp. The cheetah struck me as unusually anxious, and that seemed odd as they are among the friendliest of the cats. But discovering the lions right down the road explained that.

Hartebeest, dozens of birds, and the inimical landscapes of Tarangire at dawn and sunset and even during the day. It’s been raining hard and the white morning glories are covering the veld, altering the somber view of a misty morning with absolute radiance.

One of my favorite moments early this morning was not just coming upon a family of ground hornbill, but arriving while they were still piping their organs! The sound of the ground hornbill carries for miles, so I’ve often heard it, but not up close. It’s usually only in the very early morning.

But here they were piping away hardly 20 meters from us, the deep organ note sound resonating so loudly there was nearly a fizz after each note. The commotion we learned was prompted by an aging juvenile who wanted the giant bullfrog his mother was carrying, and mom had decided he was old enough to get one himself.

So we watched as he complained and complained then finally with the speed of a cheetah darted at his mom practically turning her over and tearing the frog out of her mouth!

The organ pipe stopped.

On Safari : Still Too Many Ele

On Safari : Still Too Many Ele

Tarangire National Park is the perfect place to demonstrate there are too many elephants in the wild right now, and it didn’t fail to confirm the theory this time! We had exceptional game viewing based from a new, luxury lodge called ChemChem.

Our day and a half of game viewing in Tarangire probably encountered 500 or more elephant, but it’s so difficult to estimate. In one panorama I challenged everyone in the group to count the elephants we saw, and the numbers ranged from 120 to 180.

Traditional elephant behavior breaks down in Tarangire because there are so many elephants. Families don’t separate themselves from one another but often travel, forage and frolic in the river together.

We saw week-old babies and octogenarians. We saw good tusks and many bad tusks or little tusks. We saw many babies and watching the rest of the family protect these little guys is absolutely wonderful.

And protecting them is so hard to do! Especially when they get down to the river and insist on rolling well beyond when mother thinks it’s time to leave.

We stayed at a new lodge outside the park for our first several days in Tarangire, before moving into the park and staying at a great place inside. The lodge is called ChemChem and it’s the dream of several French investors and old African hands.

Placed between Tarangire and Manyara, the ChemChem property extends all the way to the shores of Lake Manyara, and the activities my group enjoyed were really fantastic.

They included a walk where we got remarkably close to impala, giraffe and zebra. I don’t allow walking if there are predators or elephants around, and ChemChem assured me there weren’t.

A fabulous bush breakfast, Maasai sundowner chorus and sundowner along the lake are all a standard part of the ChemChem fare.

We’ve had some very heavy rains. According to the folks here, it’s just the rebeginning of the rainy season which starts in November/December and continues straight through May, with a noticeable letup in February. Well, the letup is over.

It was wonderfully exciting to go to sleep in ChemChem’s marvelous tents to the performance of lightning, thunder and tumultuous rain. I’m of course glad for this, because it means the migration in Serengeti (if the rain continues that far) will start to concentrate.

On our first game drive towards our second camp in Tarangire, Swala, we encountered again numerous elephant, lion mating, leopard, hartebeest and I’m sure I’m forgetting lots more. It’s been a wonderful two days so far, with another to go, in Tanzania’s elephant park, Tarangire.

On Safari: Kenya’s Election

On Safari: Kenya’s Election

There were 44 observers from the Carter Center watching the Kenyan election last night but all they observed was joy and glory! As I write this in East Africa the winners are not yet known, although Uhuru Kenyatta has a significant lead for president. But so far only 5 million on an estimated 10 or more million votes have been counted.

I was in Kenya when the polls closed, for just a few hours on my way to guiding my first Great Migration Safari.

The whole world watched as Kenya masterfully pulled off the first national election under its new and fabulous constitution. Final results will be some time in coming, because the constitution mandated that the winners achieve minimum support from all of Kenya’s 47 counties, denying any victory based exclusively on ethnicity.

This means despite Kenyatta’s lead another election between the leaders could well occur within 30 days in order to finalize the results. But based on last night I’m already creating a “Celebrate Kenya Safari” return trip!

Kenya knew that it had to prove to the world that the debacle that followed the last election in 2007 would never happen, again, and that it has truly emerged into the modern world. Moreover, it displayed a transparent democracy I don’t even think America could rival.

It wasn’t perfect, but no election is. In fact, it began ominously with an early morning attack on police poll watchers in the troubled second city of Mombasa, and 4 policemen and 2 poll workers were gunned to death.

The authority governing the election had assured that anyone in line before 5 p.m. would be allowed to vote, no matter how long the line was, and in some places it stretched for nearly a mile. But in Kilifi, north of Mombasa, election authorities ended the process at 5 p.m. even with a long line waiting, because of reports of imminent attack.

The coast remains a troubled area for a number of reasons, most importantly that it’s mostly Muslim and seriously impacted by Kenya’s occupation of neighboring Somalia.

There were long lines in many places, and some polls didn’t close until 10 p.m. In a number of areas poll officials with legislated authority simply kept the polls open even for late comers.

Kenya has more cell phones per capita than the U.S. and a free app was available that voters would use to report irregularities. And needless to say, with 10+ million voters there were many. It will take many weeks to sort them all out, but ???

I’m sure that many tour operators like EWT were waiting with baited breath. We could not restart Kenyan safaris without a positive result, and it was beyond our best hopes.

There were 14.4 million registered voters. In addition to the executive president, the election chooses governors and one senator from each of the new 47 counties, 290 national assemblypersons, 1450 county representatives and 47 “women’s representatives” who have a remarkably unique role in the new constitution.

There were 53 political parties, of which there are 8 major contenders, that fielded 12,752 candidates. The country managed 33, 400 polling places with 6-10 poll workers each, secured by 99,721 security personnel including police and … even rangers from the Kenya Wildlife Service!

Voter ID – a contentious issue in the U.S. – was mandatory, and there were two steps checking it. Approximately 20,000 fraudulent voters were stopped from voting, and although that’s insignificant statistically, it underscored how important Kenya felt legitimate democracy must be.

Elderly, disabled and pregnant women could immediately go to the front of the line. Anyone at all who wished assistance could vote with an assistant who pledged “secrecy” regarding the person’s vote. This is a brilliant addition to a country still not yet at 100% literacy.

Voting machines were high-tech, but there were parallel methods of hand counting when the machines failed, which inevitably some did.

So we won’t know for a while the final outcome, but the start is nothing less than stupendous! In a way, the fact that the process worked is what achieves the real victory.

Mali: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

Mali: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

by Conor Godfrey

For how long? Photo by New York Times
This is my last blog before turning the reins back over to Jim, so I thought I would sign out with the state of play in Mali, a country near and dear to my heart.

4,000 French troops, along with several hundred Chadians, and smaller contingents from Benin, Burkina Faso, Nigeria, and Senegal, have retaken the three main Northern cities of Timbuktu, Gao, and Kidal, and pushed the main body of insurgents northward into the Adrar des Ifoghas mountains on the border with Algeria.

Estimates put total insurgent numbers, spread among three or four different groups, around 4,000 – 6,000, and French forces report the rebels are well armed and better trained than expected.

The Good:
– The hardcore Islamist leadership is dropping like horses in the Tse-Tse belt. A mess of confirmed and unconfirmed reports claim that French and/or Chadian forces killed two leading figures in the assorted extremist groups currently fighting in Northern Mali.
– These leaders— Mokhtar Belmokhtar and Abdelhamid Abou Zeid—are committed international Jihadis from outside Mali, with long histories of murder and kidnapping. (Disclaimer: Belmoktar’s death remains unconfirmed)

As much as some readers may hate force, or the idea of the French using it in West Africa, I would argue that brute force helps separate the committed jihadis from opportunistic locals.

Joining a rebel movement seems like a much better play when they run your hometown, claim to fight your traditional enemies, or pay the best of any employer in town.

That line of work looks far less attractive when your foreign (likely Algerian or Mauritanian) boss is running for his life through the dessert.

The Bad:
– So far, diverse Northern communities are broadly receptive of the French intervention.

However, this is horrendously complicated and could turn at any moment. A few things you should keep in mind regarding about popular opinion in Mali:

Anti-northern attitudes are hardening in Southern Mali—especially negative feelings toward Tuaregs.

This xenophobia will complicate the post-conflict scenario, as Southern elites will come under serious pressure to punish the North. In the North, communal divisions make coalescing behind moderate representation nigh impossible.

See this great post by Bamako Bruce exploring the historical roots of inter-communal antipathy….

Essentially, the Tuaregs have been slavers for most of the territory’s history, so the former slaves find it rather difficult to see Tuaregs as victims.

The Ugly:
– There is no centrifugal force currently capable of creating a unified, functional Mali. Watch this two-minute Stratfor video on Mali’s geographic challenge.

Nothing has changed.

A military occupation by a superior force can enforce a temporary peace, but not make a state. The French are facing intense domestic pressure to make good on Hollande’s claim that this would be a short term operation, and every French soldier that dies (three so far) makes Mali look more like Iraq to the folks back home.

Optimism…?:
– Sure. But really just for optimism’s sake.

Mali needs representative, viable, and politically palatable representation in the North that can lead a constituent assembly, or at least claim to speak for Northern communities in negotiations with the South.

An armed peace held together by regional forces and or the (proposed) UN Peacekeeping mission might give Northern elites time to bargain over such a coalition.

However, I don’t think any of the current groups would be acceptable to the entire Northern population – the MNLA are too Tuareg centric, and the others are mostly too extreme.

The international community – especially the French – should immediately begin using whatever leverage they have to kick-start the bargaining process before the extremists come get back from the mountains.